This is For Everyone, a memoir by Tim Berners-Lee

29 April 2025

This is For Everyone, being published this September, is the memoir of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. The title, I think, belongs on the TBR list of anyone with any interest in the web.

The most influential inventor of the modern world, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a different kind of visionary. Born in the same year as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Berners-Lee famously shared his invention, the World Wide Web, for no commercial reward. Its widespread adoption changed everything, transforming humanity into the first digital species. Through the web, we live, work, dream and connect.

Not only did the British computer scientist bring us the web, he also created HTML, URLs, and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), all of which makes it possible to see this very web page.

Starbucks turns its fortunes around in Australia

29 April 2025

American coffee chain, Starbucks, is enjoying a surge in popularity in some parts of Australia.

Starbucks, put simply, had to stop chasing the mainstream market — metropolitan city coffee purveyors who savoured the neighbourhood cafe experience.

This is a far cry from their Australian nadir in 2008. To continue the good run though, they’ll need to retain the cafe-style business model, where customers can sit down and socialise. This rather than converting shops into glorified fast food collection points, apparently the norm in North America.

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AI-host presents Australian radio show undetected for six months

28 April 2025

CADA, a Sydney based radio station, was, without a word said, using an AI-generated DJ to host one of their shows, for possibly as long as six months. The ruse came to light after Australian writer Stephanie Coombes, acting on a tip off, was unable to track down any bios, press releases, or social media presences for Thy, the twenty-something presenter of the four-hour, weekday show.

Australian Radio Network (ARN), who owns CADA, later said in a statement to Mediaweek, that Thy was part of a “trial” of AI audio tools. Thy’s voice, according to the statement, was based on that of a woman working in the ARN office.

There’s a few things at play here. One is the broadcaster’s failure to disclose their presenter was AI-generated. Another is the time it took to pick this up. I don’t listen to CADA, and never heard Thy’s show, but the AI avatar must have been convincing in the extreme, if others listeners didn’t think anything was amiss, even after six months.

There’s also the point that this is the direction broadcast media might be moving in, that is, away from people as presenters, to AI-created entities. In addition, the suggestion has been made that other broadcasters might already be using AI hosts for shows, that have not, so far, come to light.

One well known AI-radio presenter however is Debbie Disrupt, a newsreader on Melbourne based radio station, Disrupt Radio. In this instance though the station made it clear from the onset that Debbie was not a real person. That particular stance seemed to move in Disrupt’s favour.

If there is life on K2-18b the K2-18 red dwarf star will kill it off

25 April 2025

News that traces of chemicals possibly indicating the presence of life on a planet, known as K2-18b, some one-hundred-and-twenty-four light years from Earth, resulted in a flurry of headlines the other week. Scientists find strongest evidence yet of life on an alien planet. Scientists claim they’ve discovered most promising ‘hints’ of potential for life on distant planet. And: Scientists Find Promising Indication of Extraterrestrial Life — 124 Light-Years Away.

Sure, it’s exciting. This is news many of us have been waiting for. Even if it’s not quite the definitive announcement we would have preferred. The problem though is the media outlets writing about the discovery of chemical “fingerprints” in the atmosphere of K2-18b, have not looked at the whole story. In fact, it seems they’ve only looked at the first few words. After all, why allow the full facts of the matter to get in the way of a click-bait worthy headline? The biggest — literally — part of the story is K2-18, the star the would-be life-hosting planet K2-18b is orbiting.

I’ve written about this before, but let’s revisit the subject, since it’s topical.

K2-18 is a red dwarf star. Red dwarfs — as the name suggests — are small. Some might only be a little bigger than Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. Red dwarfs are dimmer and cooler compared to a star like the Sun. They however have long lifespans, typically measured in trillions of years, rather than billions, as is the case for many other stars in the universe. At first glance, red dwarfs seem like ideal stars to host planets that might give rise to life. Their longevity gives lifeforms an eon to take hold and develop. But red dwarfs are not really life-friendly stars.

One problem lies in their size. Being so small, the habitable, or Goldilocks zone, the area of their solar system best suited for the fostering of life, that is neither too hot, nor too cool, is quite close to the star. Any planets in the habitable zone will be tidally locked. This means one side of the planet permanently faces the star, while the other is perpetually shrouded in darkness. In other words, the star facing side of a planet will be incredibly warm, while the dark side will be quite cold. Neither extreme may be particularly conducive to life, especially complex lifeforms.

But that’s not the worst of it. Red dwarfs also emit powerful flares that can render nearby planets lifeless. Some of these outbursts can be even more intense than those generated by the Sun. While one study of these flares found they might emanate from the polar regions of red dwarfs, rather than their equators, being the plane planets usually orbit a star along, the odds remain stacked against life here. None of this information is new, but has just about been completely overlooked in the recent news stories, about the possibility of life on K2-18b.

Here may be an unfortunate instance of a star that brings life into being, only to take it away later.

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Your time machine breaks down at the worst times in history

24 April 2025

Despite what you might think, the worst possible time for your time machine to breakdown is not 2025. Instead, in this Kurzgesagt imagining, you are variously trapped in three periods of time, some several million years after three separate mass extinction events.

The time machine taking you to the early Triassic Period (two-hundred-and fifty million years ago), the late Carboniferous Period (three-hundred-and_twenty million years ago), and finally, the early Devonian Period (four-hundred million years ago) is not so much broken down, as it acting with a mind of its own. Why else hone in on some of the worst times in the far distant past to visit?

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Australians favour early voting, time for politicians to take notice

24 April 2025

Shane Wright, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald:

A record 542,000 people, or 3 per cent of those on the electoral roll, cast a ballot on the first day of pre-poll voting on Tuesday. It was a 72 per cent increase on the 314,000 who cast a vote on the first day of pre-polling at the 2022 election.

According to the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), there are a little over eighteen-million Australians registered to vote in the upcoming federal election (Saturday 3 May 2025). To expect all of these people to attend a polling booth on a single day, is absurd, especially in more populous regions. Could that many people possibly vote in one day? Despite the best efforts of polling booth staff, I think some people might miss out. This after having possibility waited hours in a queue.

Of course eighteen million people wouldn’t all descend on polling booths on election day. Some people would have sent in postal votes, while a supposedly small number would voted early, as they were unable to do so on election day because of work or travel commitments. But with up to half of Australians expected to cast their votes during the two weeks ahead of election day, it is clear not all of those people will be working or travelling on the day. When it comes to voting early, Australians are voting with their feet, by walking to into pre-polling booths in droves.

Voting is compulsory in Australia, as it should be, and all the more reason people be given — particularly in the absence of an online voting system — a reasonable amount time to vote. Naturally there are risks in voting early. The candidate a person votes early for might make a serious blunder in the lead up to election day. The party someone backs might announce a policy on the eve the election that is not popular. Parties typically do not release the costings of their policies and promises until the last minute. People who have voted early might find the proposed expenditure excessive.

Then again, policies can quickly be altered, or dropped completely, immediately after the election. An elected lawmaker can unforgivably err shortly after assuming office. There may be little a voter could do at that point, except wait for the next election. But nine million, maybe more, Australians cannot be wrong. The option to vote early, unconditionally, is something the people want, risks notwithstanding. It is time all politicians in Australia accepted early voting as an inherent part of the election process. I also wrote about early voting at the last federal election, three years ago.

Say what you will, this is a democracy after all, but I’m sold on it.

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Move over Oxford commas, em dashes a tell tale sign of AI use

23 April 2025

Another punctuation mark I’ve been a long time user of — the em dash — is apparently synonymous with text created by AI chat bots. Marvellous. You can see two instances of em dashes in the first sentence of this post. Last October I learned the presence of Oxford commas hinted at the use of AI to generate written work. If that is indeed the case, at least AI, by choosing to use the venerable punctuation mark, is showing its intelligence.

Even if that, as an Oxford comma fanboi, makes me look bad.

But back to em dashes — which you’ve probably noticed I apply incorrectly here, by placing a space between it and a word, instead of joining them up like this—the observation em dashes were indicative of AI’s presence, was made by LinkedIn influencers. LinkedIn influencers? Are they even a thing? According to these influencers however, the presence of em dashes can only mean text they feature in was generated by an AI technology.

Real people, it seems, use hyphens instead. How bizarre. Hyphens, of course, serve a completely different purpose. They are used to join words together. Em dashes are used to add a different, but possibly related, idea to a sentence. Why on Earth then use a hyphen in place of an em dash? But the LinkedIn influencers may be onto something. On most keyboards, the hyphen shares a key with the underscore symbol. In my experience though, there is no dedicated em dash button.

On my writing app, called Writer, I need to type in two colons, with three (oh, the irony) hyphens — or minus signs — in the middle, like this: :- – -: to render an em dash. Other word processors might allow this by, say, pressing the ALT key and entering a sequence of numbers, or trying the Insert, Special Character command, in the app’s menu bar. The point here though is hyphens are a little easier for a person to add, than are em dashes.

Therefore, the only possible conclusion that can be reached, by LinkedIn influencers I grant you, is that em dashes could only be the work of an AI app, never a lazy human. Certainly not one who won’t tap out a few extra key strokes, or copy and paste an em dash that may be elsewhere on the same document. But I doubt any of these thoughts crossed the minds of the LinkedIn influencers.

They were probably trying to chase down their next this-idea-might-go-viral post. If only creating viral content were as simple as selecting some random punctuation mark, and making up some absurd claim about it.

Discord trails face scanning to verify the age of members

23 April 2025

The scanning technology, which is said to gauge a person’s age to an accuracy of one to two years, is being trialled in Australia and the United Kingdom (UK). Members of Discord — a popular communications and community building platform — can also choose to scan in a proof-of-age document, such as a drivers licence, if they don’t want to go through the face scanning process.

Is this the way things are going? Online safety laws in the UK will shortly require platforms to have stringent age-verification processes in place, while in Australia, people under the age of sixteen will soon not be able to access certain social media channels. As far as these platforms are concerned, face scanning may be the easiest way to verify a potential user’s age.

The suggestion here is face scanning will eventually be the only way to confirm a person’s age (and identity it seems), when it comes to signing up to an online platform. This is something all of us might be subject to one day.

Australia is bigger than Pluto, are then dwarf continents a thing?

22 April 2025

This, an image comparing Australia with dwarf planet Pluto, was published years ago, but somehow I only saw it for the first time a few days ago. Incredible, isn’t it? Width-ways, going from the east to west coasts, Australia dwarfs Pluto (no pun intended).

But drawing comparisons between dwarf planet Pluto, and the Australian continent, however, makes me nervous. Might such a stark juxtaposition result in Australia being downgraded to dwarf continent standing? In the same way Pluto was demoted from full, to dwarf planet, status in 2006?

Were such a travesty to occur, Australia would have to claim the title of the world’s largest island, an honour presently bestowed upon Greenland. That’s not a new idea though, a rum brand, for one, made the suggestion several decades ago.

The 2025 Global Book Crawl on at indie Australian bookshops this week

22 April 2025

The Global Book Crawl began yesterday, and numerous independent bookshops in Australia are taking part. The book crawl, which has been running for several years, aims to get book lovers across the world, into indie book stores.

In Australia, if crawlers collect enough stamps in a crawl “passport”, they might go on to win a collection of fifty books. Other participating nations include Argentina, Austria, Fiji, Guatemala, Ireland (quite a lot towns involved there), Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, and Switzerland.

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